A federal judge should not order 2600.com to yank hyperlinks to the DeCSS program from its website
because it \"would constitute a gross prior restraint of speech,\" 2600 magazine says in court documents filed
Wednesday in U.S. District Court in New York.

Drew Carey was the big winner on \"Who Wants to be a Millionare?\", earning $500,000 for his charity, the Ohio Library Foundation. He Chickened out on a chance to risk his winnings on the $1 million question: Which football star was the first to film a commercial for Disney World? The answer: Phil Simms.

Rocky Mountain News has this article about librarians in Minnesota who have had enough of pornography in their library.
\"Mary Doty stared in disbelief at the contents of the inch-thick packet of pornographic printouts delivered to her on behalf of seven Minneapolis librarians.

Recent concerns raised over health problems experienced by some Santa Fe city library employees have officials combing the Main Library for fungi that could be the source.
More than a dozen employees of the Main Library have experienced recent health problems...\"

The Lebanon, Tenn.-based chain also agreed to \"pick up all the books the library doesn\'t want because we don\'t want them to incur any disposal costs,\" Cracker Barrel spokeswoman Julie Davis said. \"

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has a very interesting Story on the permanence of articles published in electronic journals.Stanford\'s HighWire Press, which offers more than 170 scholarly journals online, announced last week that it would test the approach this spring, in a project called Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe, or LOCKSS.

Karen McCandlish writes:
Why have controversial material in your library? I was just discussing this topic with a friend, and I came up with a few reasons why it might be good to have anti-gay or racist or other controversial material in a library. It certainly is a way of raising people\'s consciousness, and perhaps their consciences, as to what\'s really out there - the level of hate where these people are coming from.

Pioneer Planet has this article about an elementary school principal in Connecticut who has taken the book \"Captain Underpants and the Perilous Plot of Professor Poopypants\" off the school library shelves.
\"Not even the children\'s book superhero ``Captain Underpants\'\' could win a battle against the Naugatuck, Conn., school district.
Officials of the Maple Hill elementary school have yanked Dav Pilkey\'s latest book, ``Captain Underpants and the Perilous Plot of Professor Poopypants,\'\' out of its library, saying that its humor is tasteless and that the book has caused students to be disruptive. While anti-censorship groups say they have not heard of other bans of Pilkey\'s books, they say they regularly receive complaints about children\'s books for taste and other reasons.\"

\"AOL\'s recent Internet filtering debacle, involving a list of permitted sites that appeared to have a strong conservative bias, underscored an important point. While the furor over Web filtering, once a rallying point for many free speech or \"free Web\" advocates, may have died down, filtering tools appear to be here to stay. And they\'re not getting much better. When a major ISP can block the Million Mom March site as unsuitable for children, it\'s clear there\'s still plenty of room for improvement.\"

\"I\'ve started each book in some way knowing what it would be about. I\'d never given myself a chance to simply spend time with children. I regretted this because a lot of the things children have to say don\'t fit into any preplanned agenda. I\'ve had the dilemma over many years of talking to children who had many whimsical things to tell me and I\'d think, \'This isn\'t going to fit into Chapter 3.\'\"

So he decided, in his early 60s, to \"set aside a period of years that I could simply enjoy these kids and let them lead me where they wanted to lead me.\"

This release from the U.S. Newswire talks about new studies that reveal that school libraries have beneficial effects on students\' performances in school. If this is so, then why don\'t they get the funding from the government that they deserve?
\"Want to raise students\'
test scores? Three new studies -- from Pennsylvania, Alaska,
and Colorado -- confirm that the secret to boosting students\'
academic performance is right down the hall in the school library.

But will school libraries get their just rewards as the Senate
begins debating the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)
today?

School libraries last received dedicated federal dollars in the
1960s. Today, the average U.S. school library gets $6 per pupil
per year from federal block grants.

\"That pays for less than half a book,\" notes Emily Sheketoff,
executive director of the American Library Association\'s Washington
office. \"If a dot com could show the results school libraries
do, its stock price would soar.\"

\"When Tahir Veliqi and Adnon Berisha left with their families from war-torn Kosova and arrived in Grande Prairie almost 10 months ago, they didn\'t know if they would see or even hear from their friends and relatives again.
But thanks to technology and a little help from the Grande Prairie Public Library staff, the teenagers have kept in touch with home. Days after their arrival last summer, Veliqi and Berisha came to the library to access its free Internet service.\"

This Story from Florida shows that planning is the second most important thing when building a new library.

\"The research and cultural heritage center was expected to open by early 2001 but will not do so until as late as March 2002. Construction has been pushed back as county officials grapple with the potential of $2.5 million in cost overruns because of problems with the design of the library. \"

Public and school libraries across the state on Saturday began a three-year campaign to raise youth\'s awareness of the learning opportunities found within their walls, and they did it by offering prizes ranging from compact disc players and NASCAR tickets to U.S. Savings Bonds, computers and rounds of mini-golf.\"

\"Members of the Teens With a Vision program volunteer after school at the library, shelving books, making arts and crafts for preschool storytelling, and performing other tasks.
At their monthly meeting on Tuesday at the Hallandale Branch Library, the teens decided that a fashion show and a multicultural day will attract others their age to the library.

\"Although totally outgunned by the deep pockets of the software lobby, the anti-UCITA forces, headed up by 4Cite (For a Competitive Information and Technology Economy, the anti-UCITA coalition to which InfoWorld belongs), did a heroic job of fighting against the bill while it was debated in the Maryland Legislature. And enough Maryland legislators got the message that several amendments to significantly defang UCITA were given consideration, particularly in the Senate.\"

\"While many library patrons may not realize it, the answer depends on the library they visit. In Chicago, access to the Internet is free of computer programs that screen out possibly objectionable material, such as full-frontal nudity.

Cleveland Live has this wonderful article about a library survey that was conducted to beef up their non-fiction collection.
\"Bohemians are at the checkout desk and the librarians couldn’t be happier.\"\"Fearing a decline in the use of its nonfiction collection, Lakewood Public Library used a customer profile to revamp its selection and rearrange its books. Residents were classified as members of the \"Bohemian Mix,\" \"Blue Blood Estates\" and \"Old Yankee Rows.\" Their tastes are reflected in new sections that feature tomes on traditional medicine, the paranormal, gardening and Mother\'s Day. It\'s Lakewood\'s way of keeping books relevant in an Internet age.\"

The Detroit News has published this article about a library that, during renovations, is letting patrons check out as many materials as they want, and can bring them back August 1st.
\"The Sherman family plans on making use of the Sterling Heights Public Library collections this summer -- from its home. The library is running a summer reading special. Patrons, like the Shermans, can take all the books, videos and audio tapes they want and keep them until Aug. 1 while the library is closed for renovations.\"
\"We checked out 133 books and videos,\" Ann Sherman of Sterling Heights said. \"A lot of them are children\'s books for my son. But we also took out books for my husband and myself.\"